Engaging Ideas - 8/11/2017

What is “winning” in politics? Civic engagement through Facebook can be good and bad. The criminal justice system and its impact on economic mobility. Men are the new college minority. College courses for incarcerated individuals in New York. What a bipartisan health care bill might look like. Getting patients to “shop around” for health care isn’t so easy.

Readers
write: What does 'winning' in politics mean? (Christian Science Monitor)Sometimes winning isn’t about winning. That’s
essentially what Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona said in a speech from the
Senate floor last week, calling on his colleagues to stop being so focused on
chalking up wins for one’s party that you lose sight of the bigger issue:
solving problems for Americans. His speech prompted us to ask you – our readers
– how you would define winning in politics. The answers reflected a thoughtful
tone, in contrast to the intense partisanship we’re seeing in American
politics.

Political
Parties Near Realignment After 20 Years of Sorting (NBC News)On the surface, the American political system
looks fairly steady, with two well-known behemoths, the Democratic and
Republican parties, fighting for control. But those two parties have changed a
lot in recent years and those changes have remade American politics.

A Civics
Lesson for Facebook (Slate)As CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out in a sizable
manifesto earlier this year, Facebook has grand ambitions to create a platform
that goes beyond just connecting family and friends. More than social media, it
wants to create the social infrastructure that powers communities from niche
interest groups to nations. But can tools to improve civic engagement from a
clickbait-driven company really be good for democracy?

Opportunity/Inequality

Our
Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart (New York Times)Many Americans can’t remember anything other
than an economy with skyrocketing inequality, in which living standards for
most Americans are stagnating and the rich are pulling away. It feels inevitable.
But it’s not.

To Boost
Income Mobility, Reform Our Bail System (The Federalist)Beyond shrinking our overly expanded
incarcerated population, bail reform would boost the United States’ stagnating
income mobility by reforming a system that traps the poor in poverty.

What
should America do about its worst public schools? States still don’t seem to
know. (Washington Post)Two years after Congress scrapped federal
formulas for fixing troubled schools, states for the most part are producing
only the vaguest of plans to address persistent educational failure. So far, 16
states and the District of Columbia have submitted proposals for holding
schools accountable under the 2015 law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act.
With few exceptions, the blueprints offer none of the detailed prescriptions
for intervention, such as mass teacher firings or charter-school conversions,
that were once standard elements of school reform.

Higher Education & Workforce Development

Why Men
Are the New College Minority (The
Atlantic)Jessica Smith raised an arm and pointed across
the lobby of the university student center like an ornithologist who had just
spied a rare breed in the underbrush. “There’s one,” she said. It was, in fact, an
unusual bird that Smith had spotted, especially on this campus: masculum
collegium discipulus. A male college student. This fall, women will comprise
more than 56 percent of students on campuses nationwide, according to the U.S.
Department of Education. Some 2.2 million fewer men than women will be enrolled
in college this year. And the trend shows no sign of abating. By 2026, the
department estimates, 57 percent of college students will be women.

Cuomo to
Give Colleges $7 Million for Courses in Prisons (New York Times)Moving ahead with a plan that has drawn
criticism from conservatives, the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is
awarding more than $7 million in grants to a variety of colleges around the
state to offer courses to prisoners.

Here's
What a Bipartisan Health Care Plan Would Look Like (Money Magazine)After Senate Republicans failed to pass a
strictly partisan repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a group from the House of
Representatives from both sides of the aisle have presented a plan to bring
down costs and keep protections in place for people with pre-existing
conditions.

Physicians
with high-risk patients struggle under value-based pay model (Modern Healthcare)Physicians who serve low-income patients with
complex conditions are more vulnerable to financial losses in value-based
payment models, according to a new study that found these providers, many of
them safety-net providers, didn't have the technological infrastructure to
report the necessary data.